A blog for the leaders of tomorrow

Leaders’ sight health

With new year starting, have you done a health checkup? For leaders, health is of utmost importance, but no doctor other than you can tell how your mental sight health is. Read further to know what I am talking about and why this is so important for you.

Eyesight checkup

I remember I did my first eye condition check-up at the age of 6. They told me I that I needed some glasses. I got them and I actually thought I looked incredibly nice with them. Later, I became aware that this was something genetical.

My father had thought he would look incredibly handsome if he had a pair of glasses and thus he had read and studied so much so that he could get one of those spectacles. Beyond appearance, optic stores obviously have an interest in you wearing glasses, for their revenues are dependent upon you buying them.

Just for your information, I got rid of the four eyes shortly after my father helped me through acupuncture sessions. By that time, I became confident enough that I could be beautiful even without eyeglasses.

Health is wealth

In business, people don’t seem care much about health. You rarely receive a medical checkup as part of the integration process, as we had received when we were kids. However, health is one of the greatest wealth sources we have. If you look around, you might notice plenty of people who exchange their health for wealth and in the end try to buy back health with their wealth. Is this really worth it?

On the bright side of labor world, looking healthy actually helps us become more successful at work. At least so claims an article from HBR: For Leaders, looking healthy matters more than looking smart. I would argue that looking healthy is not enough, you actually have to be healthy. At least from my experience, productivity is very dependent upon my health state. Even when you are hungry, you might be thinking about food and not the job on hand. One of my Toastmasters fellows said it well when he said: “Get yourself food so that when you are on stage you can focus on the message and not on your tummy”.

I will leave more health details to the numerous health specialists worldwide. They do an amazing job of contributing to our successful personal and professional lives. Nevertheless, do not forget that you are the main responsible for your own health.

Leaders’ sight health

Now let’s get back to our sight health. One of the topics you hear about when you practice meditation is that of the third eye. Through it you have intuition and can perhaps even see the future. I am not sure whether I had/have this eye, except that when I was a kid, I would put paint on that middle of the forefront just for fun (and of course it looked as if it were an eye). I am not implying the third eye’s existence nor am I encouraging you to believe in it, though I would still love to hear from you if you are a believer and would like to share your experiences with me.

I mention this additional eye because it evokes the notion that the mind can actually see. This is in very visual terms what our mind can do. For example, when people like Brian Tracy say that good leaders have a vision, they are actually saying that leaders can see the picture of a future in their minds. When we hear a powerful speech by leaders such as Steve Jobs, Mahatma Gandhi, we can also visualise their worlds.

If our mind can thus see, shouldn’t we apply the same eye vision test we all received sometime in our lives? Can we see our future? Can we see our present? How far can we see? How close can we see?

“Nearsightedness (myopia) is a very common condition in which the light coming into the eye is not focused properly onto the retina, making it difficult to see objects far away. The condition is usually caused by an elongation of the eyeball that occurs over time. Farsightedness (hyperopia) is the opposite of myopia, and is usually caused by shortening of the eyeball.”

The same can be applied to our mind vision. Is your mind suffering from nearsightedness or farsightedness? Are you focusing too much on the day to day activities and neglecting the long term goals? Or are you so attached to the day to day actions that you forgot the bigger picture?

Just like the process of correcting one’s eyesight problem, the first step is to recognise what problem we have. Once we know our problem, we can think of a variety of ways to fix it. For our eyes, we can order some glasses or put on some contact lenses, or get an acupuncture session. For our mind sight, we can prepare a cork board remembering us of the big picture and an agenda to alert us of our day to day activities, or we can have people on our side who complement our vision and give us the other part of reality we tend to ignore.

Whichever method we take, it is important to possess a healthy mental sight. It helps us to understand reality as a whole and increases our success probabilities at planning and execution.

When you are driving a car in the dark, you need a short light that is going to lighten the way to see where you are driving in the next minute, but you also need a long light every now and then to track the overall progress and see how the way ahead of you looks like. The same occurs in life and in business. By having both a long view and a short view, we get the broader picture.

As 2015 starts and lots of people focus on this year’s goals, do not forget the long term perspectives. Think beyond 2015. What does future look like?